


I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend

by howardently



Series: Hey Little Girl [2]
Category: My Mad Fat Diary
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 20:52:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,947
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4236213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/howardently/pseuds/howardently
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sequel to Hey Little Girl</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend

She doesn’t go to his gig, but he tells himself it’s fine.  _It’s fine._ It’s probably better anyway, gives him more time to stuff down his confusing feelings and tuck his crush away. The weekend without her hadn’t helped much. The store seems so full of her; her handwriting on a note at the counter, her favorite band playing overhead, her purple pen stuck in the clipboard he picked up. She’s worse than a ghost, because  ghosts don’t leave their sweaters on their chairs. And he hasn’t recently decided he fancies any ghosts, anyway.

But it’s fine.  _It’s fine._  Even if it does hurt a little that she didn’t come. They’re friends right? It doesn’t matter that you shouldn’t spend your Friday evenings fantasizing about your friends. They  _are_  friends, and he happens to know that she’s a damn fine friend. She’s a friend who does things for the people she cares about, she shows up. So why won’t she show up for him? He’s her friend too, dammit.

He consoles himself by thinking that maybe she’s been feeling some less than friendly feelings for him too. Or, rather, more-than-friendly feelings.

His disappointment does help him compartmentalize his crush, though, at least it’s good for that. So, by the time he sees her again on Monday afternoon, he feels like he’ll be able to handle himself, like he won’t mangle every sentence or blurt out sexually harassing things without thinking. She’s the type of girl who won’t go to his gig, he can’t like her that much. Fuck, it makes her so much cooler that she wouldn’t come, doesn’t it? Fuck.

So, he doesn’t watch for her to come for her 2pm shift. He doesn’t glance up at every movement in the hallway, hoping it’ll be her. And when it is her, he doesn’t feel a gash of disappointment that she doesn’t say hello as she walks by. He doesn’t listen to her put her code into the time clock. And he definitely doesn’t wait to talk to her as she heads back out to the floor.

Disappointment seems to be a theme with her. She walks by again without glancing into his office. She’s got a pen between her pursed lips as she studies her clipboard, the purple pen he’d used on Saturday. Had he put it in his mouth? He probably had. That’s almost like kissing her, the pen from his lips to hers.

He groans and rubs at his forehead. He was supposed to be done with this shit. He can’t be making saliva trees for pens.

He runs into her on the floor an hour later as she’s flicking through CDs on the rack, and she smiles at him like she’s thrilled to see him, like not saying hello earlier was not an intentional choice. She practically beams, and he finds himself forgiving her already.

She says his name, and it’s warm enough that it feels like she’s hugging him. And for a moment, he thinks she might. Her hands are out at her sides in what might be the start of a hug. And he blanks. Do they usually hug when they see each other for the first time? He’s wracking his brain, doing everything he can to remember a single other greeting they’ve shared, but his mind is completely empty.

He takes a half step forward, still not sure what he’s doing, and she turns towards him, her smile soft and questioning. A voice behind him asks a question, and he realizes that she’s looking over his shoulder, smiling at some customer with a stupid question.

“Sure,” she says, stepping around Finn. “Let me show you where that’s at.”

He hangs his head as another wave of disappointment shoves itself into him. He almost doesn’t notice that she touches his forearm briefly as she passes, pen still clutched in her hand. She leaves behind a streak of purple ink.

In one of time’s frustrating idiosyncrasies, the rest of the afternoon passes quickly and he clocks out without getting another chance to talk to her.

He’s leaving the building, rolling his neck to relieve some of the tension he’s been carrying all day. He hears her calling his name, and for a second he doesn’t know if he wants to stop, he doesn’t know if it’s better if he just pushes on out towards his car and escapes. He wants to talk to her, too much. And that’s why he should keep going, pretend like he’d never heard her, go home and drown out the ghost of her voice with records at full volume.

“Finn!”

But he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. He stops because it’s her, and because he wants to turn around and find her running towards him with her hands raised in the air, desperate to get to him before he leaves. Her chest would be heaving and bouncing too.

She’s not running when he does turn around, but she is hustling. It’s not a quite a jog, but it’s more than a brisk walk, and it’s pretty fucking satisfying. And there’s some jiggling, which isn’t bad either.

“Hey.” She says as she approaches, a tiny bit breathless. His ears get warm. “Are you leaving? I didn’t get a chance to talk to you today.”

He shrugs, acts nonchalant, though he’s disproportionally pleased that she’s anxious about getting to talk to him. “Yeah, it’s four. I’m off.”

“Fuck, is it that late already?” She puffs out her cheeks with a big gust of air. “I’m not getting shit done today.” She glances down at her empty hands and grimaces, sighs. “It doesn’t help that I keep losing my fucking clipboard.”

He laughs then, because grumbly Rae is sort of his favorite version of her. She’s still sweet and still mostly cheerful, but she gets acerbic and complains about stupid things and he thinks it’s painfully cute. She wrinkles her nose a lot too, just like that. Even before he’d full on fancied her, he’d loved that little nose squinch. Of course, wanting to bite that adorable little nose is new. He sighs.

Rae makes a sad smile and reaches to touch his arm. Is she touching him more lately, or is it just that he’s noticing every single touch? It’s exhausting, thinking about her this much.

“So, listen, I’m really sorry that I didn’t go last night.” She pouts her bottom lip out a little, and he thinks about biting that too. “I had another paper due this morning, and I just…”

She shrugs helplessly, and he notices the dark circles under her eyes and the haphazard way she’s pulled up her hair.

“Did you pull an all-nighter?” He asks, tugging a bit at her ponytail.

“Pretty freaking close.” She yawns, moving her head out of his grasp. “I think it’ll be a miracle if I make it through mid-terms. I had four papers due this week. Four.”

“Poor little duck.”

She makes a face at him, but it fades into a smile in a matter of seconds. “So, next time though, for sure. Ok? When’s your next gig?”

“Oh, I don’t know exactly.” He lies, glancing down at the white toes of her sneakers. The next gig is in just under two weeks, but for some reason, he can’t tell her about it. He’s not sure exactly why, but it might have something to do with the desire to never again experience the sickly green feeling he’d been plagued with all last night; anticipation and regret and anger and frustration and hurt all seeped into a nasty stew of emotion. It made him fumble three times, and afterwards the drummer had given him a very disapproving grunt. “But, I’ll let you know, yeah?”

“Sure.”

And then they stand and stare at each other blankly for a while. He knows why he’s reluctant to leave, why he’s content to stand there and let himself linger over the hollows under her eyes and the glossiness of her lips, but he can’t figure out why she is. Or maybe he’s too busy thinking about her mouth to try.

After a minute, Rae clears her throat and glances towards the registers. “Well, um, have a good night, Finn.” She mumbles, giving him another lazy smile.

“Yep. You too. Try and get some rest.” He awkwardly cuffs her shoulder, and she sways back and forth on her feet. He feels disgusted with himself, so he doesn’t wait for a reply before he turns around and heads towards the door.

—

And then, time passes. Nothing much happens. They flirt a little, like they always do. It maybe feels like more to him, because he goes home and replays each interaction when he’s lying in bed at night. But it pretty much goes back to normal.

Or maybe normal plus.

Plus lots of hours thinking about kissing her. Plus grinning as he tells Chop a story of something she’s said. Plus putting on some of the lotion she’d left on her desk and smelling like her for the rest of the night. Plus crying out her name as he works himself over in the shower. Plus wondering what she’d say about absolutely everything that happens to him. Plus sighing over romantic scenes in the movies Izzy makes them watch. Plus finding her name in all the stupid sappy songs on the radio. Plus his aching heart.

So yeah, maybe not so normal.

—

It’s two weeks later, and he’s working the Saturday morning shift before another gig tonight. Normally when he knows they’ll be playing, he feels buzzy and unsettled all day, restless to get to the moment when he loses himself on the stage to the music. But he’s felt curiously flat all week, none of his normal anticipation present to lift him from his doldrums.

He’s grumbling to himself as he unlocks the fashion closet. He’s got half a dozen giant boxes of handbags that have somehow become his job to move from the back to this closet, despite the fact that it’s definitely not part of his job. He’s worked seven days in a row, and he’s only got another hour in his shift before he’s off for two days, which makes lugging these boxes even more annoying. If it was anyone but her he was helping, he’d fuck off and leave it.

He intends to leave one of the boxes propping open the heavy door so he can move the others in, but when he sees her, he steps forward and lets the box slide along the floor until the door shuts behind him.

She’s sitting on the only chair in the room, a spread of t-shirts and security tags on the table in front of her. She looks up as the door opens, and Finn’s heart does some kind of ugly lurch in his chest. She’s crying.

“What’s wrong?” He asks instantly, closing the space between them without thought. He doesn’t know what he intends to do, sweep her up in his arms maybe, but she’s crying and he at least needs to be close.

“Nothing.” She says, shaking her head and wiping at her damp cheeks. She sniffles, wrings her hands together in her lap, gives him a weak imitation of a smile. “Nothing, I’m fine.”

“Rae.” He says, and it comes out sounding like a plea. How is it possible that her crying hurts him this much? “What’s wrong?”

She looks up at him for a long minute, and her tears resume their path down her cheeks. Her eyes are huge and shiny, but dim. His ribs seem to be closing in on him, crushing everything in his chest into a squishy mass of empathetic hurt. He thinks that if he could only touch her, it might get better.

“It’s nothing. Mark and I had a fight is all.” She says finally, turning away to look at the taped up magazine cut outs on the wall. She sniffles and shrugs, like it’s no big deal, but it only serves to convince him that it is a big deal.

And if it’s a big deal, that means it must have been a big fight. Which makes him feel… things. He’s selfishly pleased; he thinks about them fighting all the time, practically wills it into existence. He wants nothing so much in the world as for her to break up with her boyfriend. He wouldn’t even make it a single day before swooping in and making her his. Late at night, he shamefully plans his speeches and the way the color would come back into her pale cheeks when he told her.

He also feels like a total shit. Because if she’s this upset, hiding in a closet at work and crying because of a fight, maybe he doesn’t want her to fight with her boyfriend. She’s hurting, and he’s finding that seeing her tearful eyes and quivering bottom lip somehow hurts him too. And he feels guilty, because maybe he did will their fight into existence, and because a big part of him still wants to will an even bigger fight into existence.

“Do you want to talk about it?” He offers stupidly. He’s gotten better, much better, about being normal and not saying daft things to her, but one or two slip by every week.

Rae shakes her head, rolls her eyes and gives him a watery smile. It’s a bit stronger this time. “Angela should be here in an hour or so. I’ll be okay.”

For some reason, this feels like a blow, and he furrows his forehead. “I’m here now. You can talk to me.”

“I can’t really talk to you about Mark, Finn.” It’s soft, but expansive. The words seem to fill the air in the enclosed space, and he becomes achingly aware that they’re alone.

“Why not?”

“You know why.” She whispers, and his heart stops.

It’s the first time she’s ever acknowledged that this thing between them is real, that it’s there for her too. And for a blinding moment, he can see with perfect clarity all her soft smiles and breathless laughter and careless touches for what they are.

This thing between them is real.

The knowledge seems to grow around them, filling his chest with something bittersweet than he can almost taste. He wants to let it expand, let it grow and overcome all the space that’s in the room, all the space that he’s carefully curated between their bodies over the last couple of weeks. But her face is still pale and damp, and he recognizes for a moment that this thing between them isn’t just about him. She’s in it too. So he folds it up as carefully as he can, tucks in back into his ribs to be explored some other time. Hopefully with her.

“C’mere girl.” He says gruffly, but casually. He’s got to do something to crack the stillness around them, something to put them back on solid ground. This is probably not the most sensible option, but he means it only for her, only as a friend. He holds his arms open.

Rae stares at her shoes for a moment, but she smiles when she glances up and sees his invitation for a hug. She stands slowly and crosses the floor until she’s before him. She ducks her head, presses her nose against his shoulder and leaves her arms slack at her sides. He wraps her up loosely, keeps his arms and hands in safe places across the center of her back. Not her hair, not her hips.

He runs his hand soothingly up and down as she starts to sink into him. It starts as short sweeps in the area of her ribs, but she shifts her face against his shoulder and lets one arm curve over his back. It’s nice, warm and comforting. He just wants her to feel better. His hand starts to travel further and further over her back, until his fingers catch in the tips of her hair and bump over the waistband of her jeans under her shirt.

The air gets still and heavy again. He discovers that once he’s allowed himself to touch her, he can’t stop. He tracks his hand across her back, lets it sweep through her hair, moves it to her neck to tilt her head up. She stays still in his embrace, lets him angle her head until his hand is against her cheek, tracing the contours of her cheekbone. His thumb hesitates against the corner of her mouth, but when she doesn’t move, he gets bolder and runs his thumb over her bottom lip.

It’s so quiet, so still, and there’s nothing but them. They’re alone. Her tears have dried and her eyes are liquid and luminous and unfathomable as they meet his. Without thought, without permission, his head bends towards her, his lips pull towards hers like there’s no other place they could ever go.

“I can’t, Finn.” She breathes, pulling her hand up to push against his chest. “I can’t.”

He steps back, winded, caught up in the spell. Of course. Of course. She can’t, they can’t. She’s got a boyfriend. They can’t. She’s crying again, and this time it’s worse, because he knows that it’s his fault. He was supposed to keep it light, to comfort her, not to make even more of a mess. She covers her face with her hands and cries into her palms, and he thinks there’s something in the way she catches her own tears that’s going to haunt him later.

He doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know if it will make it worse, but he tugs in again until the backs of her hands press into his chest and holds her while she cries. He rests his chin on the top of her bowed head, and his chest throbs in time with her sobbing breaths.

It hurts like a fever, an ache that settles into his bones until his body can’t help but manifest it into chattering teeth and quivering muscles. He can’t let himself look too closely at it, but he knows it’s going to be worse now that she feels the same and they still can’t. It’s going to be worse with the memory of her shaking shoulders and tear-filled eyes.

So, he just holds onto her the best he can for the moment. She comes back in slow measurements. Her hands fall from her face. Her breathing slows back to normal. She lifts her damp face and steps out of his arms. He doesn’t know what to do with them without her, doesn’t know how he’ll ever figure out how to fill them properly again. They hang limply at his sides.

Rae wipes her cheeks and swallows. Her eyes are so sad, so hopeless, and he wants to say something to make it better. He wants to apologize for trying to kiss her, for feeling the way he does. He wants to tell her it’s okay that she feels that way too, it’s okay that she can’t. He wants to assure her that he won’t do it again.

“Can you…” She says into the silence, and he flinches. “Can you just send Angela in here when she gets in?”

He stares at her for a moment longer, not quite ready to let go. He knows that as soon as he leaves this room, they’ll both pretend like this never happened. He’s not quite ready to return to the world the way it was, the way it will be now. Rae lowers her head to stare fixedly at the ground.

“Please.” She murmurs, so he leaves the room.

He clocks out early, leaves a note for Angela and the boxes outside the door of the closet. He can’t hear if she’s crying again through the thick wall.

—

The gig is that night, a girl hits on him and he goes home with her. She puts her hand on his wrist, and he knows the closer it is to the hand, the better. He gets drunk enough to go home with her, not drunk enough to forget that he’s into Rae.

The guys rib him about it the next day, she overhears, says it’s disgusting. He almost hates her then, almost hates her for having sex with her boyfriend even though he knows she’s into him, but expects him to be celibate? He decides to pull as much as possible.

Winter sets in, Rae comes in wearing a knit cap, snow in her hair, nose and cheeks and lips pink and he thinks about kissing her so much. One morning, he holds the ladder for her as she hangs garland in the window, doing his best to hold himself together. In his head, he writes songs comparing the moon to her anatomy. She slides down the ladder like she’s crawling down his body and he doesn’t take the polite step back, he stays in her space and she stares at his mouth. It’s not an almost kiss, more like almost an almost, but he won’t forget the way her lips part and her eyes darken. He drinks himself to sleep that night and calls in sick the next day.

They get engaged in November. She comes in the next day with the ring on her finger, beaming, more beautiful than he’s ever seen her before. She’s radiant, luminous, so he tells her, “You’re glowing.” She smiles at him like she knows it, like she feels it, like she’s surprised that people can see her joy leaking out of her skin. He stares at her all day, marvels. He memorizes her features and the exact color of her skin and the curve of her bottom lip and the graduations of the brown in her eyes.  He studies her and carefully tucks it all away. And then he doesn’t look at her anymore.

As the days grow shorter and dimmer, Rae seems to dim as well. Her laughter no longer rings down the halls, she comes out for drinks less and less. He’s glad, because he can let his eyes slide over her, let his eyes glaze over the diamond on her finger, but he can’t stop hearing her voice. So the less she’s around, the better. They don’t flirt anymore, they barely speak. He waits to take his breaks until after she’s done. She seems sadder, and one day he glances up to realize that her clothes are hanging looser too. He wonders if she’s fighting with Mark, if she’s struggling with school. He wants to ask her, feels like he’s choking on all the things he won’t let himself say. By Christmas, her eyes are sunken and dark. She brings him a box of cookies and a wan smile, he throws them away.

He drinks more and more. He realizes that he’s in love with her. He wakes up in strange beds with girls whose name he can’t remember, and he always hears her voice in his head, “that’s disgusting.” Somewhere he’s started smoking again, and he’d worry about himself if he could spare the energy from hating everything.

He sees her crying twice more in January, but he knows better than to get involved. He ducks around corners to stay out of it, he gets Angela. Rae doesn’t laugh anymore, and he can’t remember the last time she came to sit on the side of his desk and talk. He doesn’t watch her in the camera.

One morning he wakes up in a strange bed beside a girl with long raven hair. His heart beats painfully, crawling out of himself to get to her. He stops breathing for a minute. The girl shifts in her sleep, and it’s not Rae. Of course it’s not Rae. He weeps in some strange girls bed, weeps for himself and for the girl he loves and for the girl he doesn’t care about.

He stops drinking after that.

Slowly, so slow that he barely notices, winter thaws and so do they. Rae’s smiles return, slow at first but increasing more and more. Her laughter starts to ring through the hallways, and she stops in to say hi when she comes in. They start to talk again. Has he seen this new movie? Did she hear that album? It’s midway through March the first time she touches him. It goes back to normal, or as close to normal as it can get with him being in love with her. But he’s compartmentalized now, he’s shoved all that love and longing and aching under his skin and it bothers him less. He thinks he’s starting to get over her.

They sit next to each other in companionable silence once again over lunches in the breakroom. She laughs at his jokes, and he finds them easy coming. He doesn’t wonder what his face does, he’s stopped caring if she knows he loves her a long time ago.  She comes in one day with a streak of bright pink in her hair and he tells her she looks happy, and she does.

—

It’s a Thursday afternoon when they fall over the edge.

“Finn?”

“Hey.” He smiles and she smiles, and he almost doesn’t think about how beautiful she is. She looks stiff and he cocks his head.

“Um… I, uh, I wondered if…” She takes a deep breath and straightens her spine. “You maybe wanted to have dinner.”

“Sure,” he shrugs. “Did you want to try that new Thai place? I think I’ve got the menu around here somewhere.” He rummages in his desk, searching for it.

“Oh, no.” She says, and something in her tone makes him look back up at her. Her eyes are so big. Just big, he reminds himself, not beautiful. She rocks forward and breathes deeply again. “I meant just us. Uh, somewhere else.”

He furrows his forehead. “Okay. So, not Thai? Do you want to order pizza? Or I could go pick something up, I guess.”

She shakes her head, eyes growing impossibly bigger. She bites her lip. He’s almost unaffected. She smoothes her hair over the back of her head. “Fuck. I’m not saying this right.”

Finn shakes his head, bemused and a bit concerned at her bumbling. She’s never like this. She’ll go quiet, sure, but when she does talk, it’s always smooth and firm. She almost never struggles for words this way.

“Finn,” She starts again, leaning towards him, blowing out, smiling grimly. “I wondered if you wanted to have dinner with me. Like a date.”

Everything is still and silent for a long moment.

“What?” He blurts unthinkingly, and it comes out harshly, like a bark or a shout maybe.

Rae swallows and the color drains from her face. She’d been blushing, how had he missed that? “You know what, forget it. Just, forget I said anything.” She mumbles and turns to leave.

“Wait!” He yells, jumping to his feet. The desk is in front of him, and for a blinding moment he cannot remember how to get around it. “Rae, wait!”

She stops half a dozen steps from the door and turns to face him. She looks scared and a bit like she wants to crawl out of her skin. He recognizes the expression from his mirror, and this is the thing that makes his heart start to pound.

“What do you mean? A date?” He asks, and she just shrugs uncomfortably. “What about Mark?”

She cocks her head, furrows her eyebrows, and it sends a wave of relief through him. Something about her anxious expression was sending him back to that long bleak winter. “What do you mean?”

“You’re getting married.” He doesn’t want it to sound bitter, to show how much he hates that fact, but he’s sure some of that bleeds through.

Rae cocks her head, considers him. “No. We broke up. Months ago.” Finn glances down at her left hand, and when she notices, she lifts it up for him to see clearly. Her ring finger is bare. There’s not even a mark from where the ring used to be. He stupidly thinks to himself that getting engaged to someone ought to leave a mark of some kind. You shouldn’t be able to be getting married one minute and then not the next without it leaving some kind of scar. But then he remembers her sunken eyes and pale skin and realizes that she didn’t get out unscathed at all. All those weeks when she looked haunted and he tried not to look, it was because she had broken up with her fiancé.

“You broke up with Mark?” He asks. He just needs to hear it again.

“Yes.” Her eyes still have a bit of sadness around the corners, he wonders how he hadn’t noticed that either. When was the last time he actually noticed her?

“And you’re asking me out on a date?” Maybe he needs to hear this again too.

“Yeah.” She says, shrugging and smiling faintly. “Fancy it?”

He thinks through his options. He can tell her to fuck off, he hasn’t been waiting around for her all these months. He can calmly say no thank you, and maybe in two more months it won’t hurt to look at her anymore. He’s almost over it, it doesn’t exactly seem smart to let himself get right back in the thick of it again. He can close the distance between them and kiss her like he’s never kissed anyone before, kiss her with everything that’s been burning in his chest, unable to be numbed, all these months. He can scoop her up and press her up against the filing cabinets and lose himself in her. He can sweep everything off his desk and just take her right there, consequences be damned. Or, he can say he doesn’t know, he’s not sure if it’s a good idea, can he think about it?

The words are on the tip of his tongue. A pause, a moment to get his head around this new information, that’s what he needs.

Instead he says, “Yeah.”

“Yeah?” She asks, breathless, and he finds himself smiling hugely in response to her grin.

He thinks about rounding the desk and kissing her then. It seems like he should be able to, it seems like he deserves that much. Like they deserve that much. But, and God this is strange, he’s nervous. He’s nervous about kissing her, and it occurs to him that maybe he shouldn’t waste their first kiss in this grubby office surrounded by the band posters and boxes and office supplies. So, he just rounds the desk, leans against its front and reaches a hand out towards her.

Rae stares at it for a moment, then takes two steps forward and rests her fingers in his palm. They’re shaky, and he squeezes them reassuringly. He can’t help but stare at their hands twined together, hands touching is very very good, for a long minute. Her fingers are soft and pale and her nails are painted blood red and fuck, her hand looks good in his. He memorizes it, locks it away deep inside him to be examined later. The Rae compartment in his head seems suddenly very full.

Then it’s her squeezing his trembling fingers.

“So, uh,” he clears his throat. “Are you busy tomorrow?”

She steps closer, and her knee brushes his. “Actually, I think we’re both off.” She smiles.

“You checked already?” He asks, and something bubbles in his chest. He’s used to things moving and shifting and thrumming and throbbing beneath his ribs whenever she’s around, but this is new.  It’s never felt this… pleasant before.

She shrugs, but she’s smiling this soft coy little grin that makes him feel a little winded, because it’s occurred to him that it’s for him. He stands, still holding her hand, and allows himself to run his fingers along the pink streak in her hair.

“I guess…” He breathes as Rae tilts her head beneath his fingers.  “I guess we have a date then.”

She nods and starts to pull away, but he doesn’t let go of her hand, so she ends up rocking in towards him, closer. Her smile slides into something else, something he doesn’t have a name for but makes his heart pound anyway. She holds his gaze for a minute, like she’s asking permission, then leans in to press a soft kiss against his cheek near his ear. He lets his eyes close, lets himself enjoy the softness of her lips and her hair brushing against his neck, lets himself inhale deeply the soft sweet scent of her cheek. Her lips linger, and she nuzzles her nose against his skin. Her sigh sends a rush of goosebumps over his skin.

How important is a perfect first kiss, anyway? This moment seems pretty damn close to perfection.

The walkie-talkie on the desk behind him squawks and they both jump. Rae cocks her head and gives him a rueful smile, and he reluctantly lets her fingers slide from his as she moves around him to answer the call.

“What’s up?” She says into the radio, and he enjoys the way her body leans in to his rather than away. They listen to one of the cashiers ask her for assistance at the counter, and both sigh.  “I’ll be right there.”

She smiles at him, and leans in to give him one more kiss on the cheek like she can’t quite help it, like she’s been wanting to for months.  

—

It’s nearly three weeks later when she finally makes it to one of his gigs. He doesn’t fuck up at all this time, it’s a nearly perfect set. She’s right there at the edge of the stage, and the look on her face while she watches the band- he knows it’ll sustain him for a long time. When he comes down afterwards, sweaty from the lights and buzzy from playing, she throws herself at him, wraps her arms around his damp neck and kisses him in a way that makes his blood turn molten. He wraps an arm around her waist and steers them towards a corner, a dark corner hopefully. She doesn’t stop kissing him until they bump into someone coming back from the bar.

“Sorry!” she trills, grinning madly.

Finn can’t help but stare at her in wonder. She’s gorgeous and free and vibrant and his. And she smiles like she’s happier than anyone has a right to be. She’s luminous and it doesn’t make his chest ache, it just makes him breathless and full. He kisses her again, and he can feel her smiling still.

“Fuck, I’m glad I never saw you play before.” She laughs into his neck, and he pulls back to frown at her.

“Were we bad? I thought we sounded pretty good tonight.”

“No, you idiot.” She lifts her hand to tug at his bottom lip. “It would have made everything so much more complicated than it already was. I wouldn’t have been able to stop myself from jumping your bones. You looked fucking sexy up there.”

He can practically feel himself puffing up, and he can’t help the cocky grin that overtakes him. “And are you going to be jumping my bones now?” He laughs.

Rae leans in to whisper in his ear, “Most definitely.” She nips at his earlobe, runs her tongue along the sensitive skin, and he stops laughing. He looks down, twines his fingers with hers and tugs her out of the bar. They can sit and laugh over pints another time. They’ll be plenty more chances.


End file.
